1 Give them a source of information

The time has come for me to confess. I use textbooks.

That this makes sense as a joke is sad. That I felt guilty for using them is sadder. I’ve had many comments and eyebrows raised about “another” textbook lesson during my time teaching and still struggle to understand why. To me textbooks are the epitome of a scaffold: they’re a support to be used while learning a craft that will be taken away when the learning is done.

The nature of their support is literally to manage cognitive load. While your pupils are still embedding the requisite knowledge in their long-term memory, give them a textbook. Allow them a chance to work at a higher conceptual level. What would you rather, they construct a misconception from the mental odds and ends they have lying around?

2 Show and tell

Dual-coding is not a new idea. Pairing graphics and words is not a new idea. That it works is not a new idea. Even this particular take on it is not new!

In their Learning about Learning report, Pomerance and co emphasised it is pairing graphics WITH words. Not words then graphics. Not graphics then words. Both. Together.

Why don’t I do this? Probably because too often I want to ask my class obtuse questions about ‘what does this show?’

Why does this work? The theory goes that it takes advantage of more “pathways” through which we can take in information thereby reducing the space this new information takes up in our working memory – reducing cognitive load.

3 Tell them what you want them to know

In my experience, it’s very easy to get hung up Bloom’s taxonomy or higher-order thinking or inquiry but all of those, along with the body of work they represent rely on one thing: knowledge. I’ve taught so many lessons focussing on getting pupils thinking, trying to challenge them to explain and describe, without simply telling them what they need to know. It is my view that until pupils have a certain amount of knowledge in a domain, they are unable to start doing any of those skills that we prize so highly.

How do we do this then? Spend time explicitly teaching knowledge in lessons. Give them resources such as knowledge organisers. Teach them to use knowledge organisers! Tell them what something is, then tell them what it isn’t. Construct meaning using their ideas but the whole time guide the process. Address misconceptions. Probe what they know using HINGE questions. Keep probing until they’ve got it.

Is this boring? Maybe but not necessarily. Consider this: if pupils can start seeing success, and all pupils can succeed about remembering, then they will love it.

4 Powerpoint as prompt

There’s a part in Steve Jobs’ biography where the author recounts how Steve would refuse to listen to any presentation involving PowerPoint saying that “people who know what they’re talking about don’t need

[it]

.” Now given what I’ve just said about showing not telling, this may sound slightly contradictory. However, the point is this: the Powerpoint is not teaching the lesson. You are.

By all means, have subtle cues in there for you to remind you to hand out red pens while the task is going on, have a timer to satisfy your TLAC complex and dual-code to your heart’s content. However, if you find yourself losing track of where you got to on a slide, there’s too much on there!

I don’t want to put limits like ‘words per slide’ or ‘slides per lesson’ because there is bound to be an exception to this. I know I’ve done lots of presentations where I’ve carefully built up a picture slide by slide, transition by transition and every bit is crucial to take pupils along a steady sequence of learning. The key though is that I am taking them on this sequence – not the presentation. The presentation is there to support and reinforce – to create powerful moments of learning that will help embed what you’re saying deeply and broadly into your pupils minds.

5 Test, test, test

We forget things over time. We remember information best that we access many times over a long period – think phone numbers or addresses. Leverage this to your advantage then by getting pupils to go back and remember things they learnt a period of time ago. This works best if you access it after a few days, then a few weeks, then a few months and so on. Gradually increasing the time between practice allows sufficient forgetting so that re-accessing the information further embeds it. Without the forgetting, the memory isn’t embedded. That’s why, no matter how many times they recite it in a lesson, they will forget it.

Is this a rebuff to point 3? Certainly not! In fact, in order to do point 3 well, the curriculum has to be carefully designed around fundamental knowledge. Doing this is also excellent preparation for the tests. In my department we’re just finishing up getting our KS4 curriculum into a series of powerpoints including the knowledge and followed by a series of slides with recall questions on this. With these, teachers can start every lesson with a quick quiz from any topic. An excellent ‘Do Now’ and simple for planning. See also retrieval roulette, knowledge organisers, and, science specific, Adam Boxer and co’s brilliant SLOP booklets.

6 Chunking

This is the one I’m working on right now. How can I break tasks, particularly multi-step, practical tasks, into just enough for the pupils to be able to do without overloading their working memory? After some feedback from a colleague setup through our wonderful coaching network at my school, I’m going to be giving this a go over the next few weeks. I’ll keep you posted!